Uji — Session 2

Complete English transcript — About transcripts

So let us chant Kaikyoge before the talk.

[recitation, 00:00:06–00:00:39]

Carrying on from this morning, everybody got a copy?

So we've got Master, 13th century— sorry, Master, 9th century, Zen Master Yakusan Igen's poem, Time present standing on the mountain height, time present sinking to the depths of the ocean. Time present, an angry demon. Time present, a buddha. Time present, the formal ceremony. Time present, the temple compound. Time present, an everyday individual. Time present, pervading the whole universe.

The pervading the whole universe, we can interpret that he means sitting in zazen. When we sit in zazen, we stop dividing ourselves from the world, and we're sitting in the whole universe. So lots of snapshots, concrete times, and this is what he wants the poem to convey. So the poem identifies time present, or the now, with actual concrete circumstances. If we were to write it in a normal way, we would say, At a certain time, so and so happened, then at another time, so and so happened. But the poem is written more simply.

Master Dogen comments, Time present means that time is the present, and the present is time. The state of buddha is always made real at a time, and because of this, the state is illuminated by the light of the present.

So, Time present means time is present. In Japanese and Chinese, you can put two characters together in a compound, uji, the title of the chapter. And in English, we normally want to insert something, time and present moment, to link two things together. But in Japanese, time present means time is the same, identified with, inseparable from present. ‘The state of Buddha is always made real at a time.’

So the state of Buddha is the state of being in the place where we are, being awake to the time and place where we are now. ‘And because of this, the state is illuminated by the light of the present.’ It doesn't necessarily mean some kind of spiritual searchlight, in a metaphorical sense. It can also be interpreted to mean when we are actually in the present, we can see things more clearly. And when you're sitting in zazen, you notice the times when you are reflecting inwards. Although your eyes are open, you are not looking at what's outside.

What's outside has a kind of film over it, we could say. It's not bright. But when, in those moments in zazen, where we're just sitting and our eyes are just seeing naturally, everything is brighter. So we can say the light of the present is illuminating, and we are illuminated by it. Master Dogen goes on, having identified time and present as one thing, and talked about Buddha being in the present moment and being in the present moment is an illuminated state, he then puts another point of view. ‘But we must also study time as 24-hour time this day.’

In other words, we shouldn't reject the idea that there is a flow of time, 24 hours in a day.

Anger has its time, and so it is 24-hour time. 24-hour time is relative. Although we can't be sure if one period of 24 hours is longer or shorter or faster or slower than another, we still say that a day lasts for 24 hours.

So here he's saying we can see time as a continuous process. Through 24 hours. And in that seeing time as a continuous process, sometimes we see it subjectively, relatively.

So maybe this hour will go very slowly, but the last hour, when we were sitting there, may have gone very quickly, and the next hour may go very quickly, and the next five minutes may go very slowly. Those relative feelings, experiences we have, are one way to look at the flow of time. Another way is to be objective and to measure time with little clockwork devices. So that ties us to something physical, something external. So then we measure time objectively according to external measuring devices. But in both cases, we see time as moving.

So we say, the last zazen session just went like a flash, but of course I know that it took one hour because I can measure it. So we have these subjective and objective views of time flowing as a process. So he doesn't want to reject that. He would be silly to reject that, because without viewing time as a process, we can't really function as a human society.

We could probably function as a loose band of animals, just following circumstances, but we couldn't function as a civilization. So a civilization is based on us sharing the belief in time as a continuous process, which we can measure more or less objectively. Four hundred years ago, not very objectively, using the sun and so on. But these days, very objectively. So our actions are timed very exactly to our measurements. Whereas four hundred years ago. Probably didn't matter so much whether you were on time or not, because nobody knew what on time was. When everybody arrived, that was on time. When the sun came up, that was on time.

He carries on, and although we never doubt our ability to trace clearly the passage of time, we cannot be sure that we know clearly what time is. As ordinary people, we have many doubts about many things, but our doubts are not always the same. They are always changing. But although this is true, every one of those changing doubts is time present.

So first of all, he says, although we have a subjective, relative view of experience of time, and we also have a more objective, measurable view of time, we don't doubt that there is something called time moving on, usually. And although we don't doubt it, we don't really know exactly what it is. And then he points out that ordinary people, we doubt lots of things, but our doubts change from day to day, from moment, year to year. And all those doubts, or lack of doubts, happen in a time present. So he goes away into subjective and objective process view of time, and then brings us back and says, but everything that's happening actually is always now. Our doubting takes place now. We can never doubt in the future. We can never doubt in the past. We can only doubt now.

He goes on. We understand that the universe consists of all the things contained in this world. We must also understand that all the people and things in the universe have their time present.

So here, he is taking a subjective view of time, that every separate person, thing, has their own present moment. It's an individual thing. We all have our own present.

Just as individual things are independent of each other, so individual time presents are independent of each other. This means many people can want to find the truth at the same time, and there can be many times at which a single person wants to find the truth.

What he wants to say there is that— The present moment belongs to each entity, each person and thing individually. But at the same time, all those individual time presents are inclusive. So at this moment, everybody's time present is one time present.

But everybody, looking from their own point of view, has their own time present. I have my now. You have your now. So he's pointing out that time present is both independent and inclusive, which are two opposite things. The independent means to be separate; the inclusive means to be together. No. Yes, you can say so, yes. No, he's saying that we all experience an individual now, but our experience of the individual nows are all now. So two different points of view: the individual point of view and the collective point of view. So he's trying to describe real experience.

So it doesn't always sound objective and logically consistent. In fact, those two things that he points out there, that we've all got our own nows, but all our own nows are all one now. Contradictory. That's because he finds real experience contradictory, depending on how you look at it. So we can say that the now, now includes a whole array of personal nows. And a single person experiences a series of personal nows: my now, my now, my now, my now.

So he's creating two different images of what now is. An image of now, now, now, now, and an image of now, now, now, now. So one is a horizontal picture of all these nows, and the other one is a picture of a line of nows.

Participant: Well, a line.

Participant: You have a perspective when you take all the nows in the same year.

Mike: Yep.

Participant: You have a horizontal perspective when you take all the nows in different years.

Mike: That's it. That's the image. Or, as I learned when I listened to Baron Boen's paper, his masterclass, in music you have depth in a chord that way and that way. So this is the image he's creating in trying to describe the indescribable. ‘This is true not only of wanting to find the truth, but also of actually realizing the truth and actually practicing a Buddhist life.’ So we can want to find the truth and we can realize the truth at a moment, at a moment, at a moment.

This person, who I think of as myself, is a person that I put together at one time present. We can apply this thinking to everything in the universe, and this kind of intellectual analysis is the starting point of Buddhist practice.

So, to realize the truth, the phrase to realize the truth, which comes up so much, means to realize what is real in each concrete time present, in each concrete now. And this is what it is to practice a Buddhist life. We construct ourselves. We put ourselves together at each moment. So at this moment, I construct an image of myself, and I hold that image of myself. The next moment, I hold it.

And the memory of all those held images of myself I think of as permanent Michael. In the same way, our interpretation or conceptualization of the universe is something we construct at every moment. Practising zazen, we sometimes have moments where what’s happening just happens. Or sometimes, sitting in a chair, we just have moments of what is happening happen. So we hear noises on the roof, we’re sitting, we’re listening to somebody talking. Then we interpret or construct our world again, and the world we construct is familiar to us and shared between us all.

So I can say, It’s raining now, and we may all think, Oh, if it’s raining tomorrow morning, we’ll have to work inside instead of outside, or, Did I switch the heater on in my room? or whatever. So in constructing our world, we all construct a future. What Master Dogen is saying is that is a construction which human beings make to interpret the world. But in the present moment, there is only what is happening to you, uninterpreted.

And he goes on to explain that more. But the person who has clarified their real state sees only each thing, each thing, each thing, and lets go of understanding the nature of each thing. And at that moment, time present contains the whole of time, and that time contains all things. Thus the whole of existence, the whole universe, is present at each moment of time. Have a quick look to see if you can find any part of the universe that has escaped from this present moment.

Participant: (laughs)

Mike: It's all there. What he's creating here is a picture of a person who is not constructing their world. And we can't really imagine that there can be people who just see each thing, each thing, and let go of understanding the nature of each thing. Sounds kind of mindless way to live. But of course he doesn't mean that there are people around who live their whole lives just seeing each thing, each thing, each thing, each thing. But within our lives, we're doing it all the time. During zazen, many of us did it. Many of you did it.

I was thinking about how to make a pattern for a kashaya. But those fortunate ones who were chopping down the brambles from the hill may have been just taking each thing, each thing, each thing, and not understanding the nature of each thing. So instead of catching hold of a plant and thinking, Oh, that's a so-and-so. Now I'm going to cut it. Shall I cut it here? In one fluid act, you catch hold of it and cut it.

So what he's describing is not some kind of superhuman person who goes through life without interpreting the world, but just the simple state of action which we all experience every day, sometimes more, sometimes less. And of course, our experience in zazen. In zazen, although we have lots of thoughts coming and going, we also have a period where we experience each thing, each thing, without interpreting. And in those times, everything is contained in those times. There is no part of the universe that's not here. It doesn't mean it's all here, but it means we have no boundaries. We are part of one huge whole because we haven't divided ourselves off from it by thinking or by using language.

It causes confusion, but it can also be beneficial. So we shouldn't think that conceptualization is bad. Don't do it, but we should notice what happens when we conceptualize. Yes. Yes, in a society.

Question: But because it's sick in the world of total conceptualization, is this what I'm doing?

Mike: Yes.

Participant: I'm not feeling able to see myself,

Mike: Yes.

Participant: whatever I need that

Mike: Yes.

Participant: to be able to be brought to you.

Mike: Yes. Yes. Yes. That's right. We can say living three lives simultaneously: the conceptual world that we create, the physical world that we sense with our senses, and the world of action, where we lose both and we're just acting, like a baby. So we inhabit three lives at the same time. But our civilizations have biases. So Western civilization is biased towards the conceptual. Right back from ancient Greeks and before, we value ideas about the world as much as or more than the world itself. And this was the— who was had the story of the shadows on the back of the cave, Plato.

So Plato said that there is a real life, which is the conceptual, and there's the physical world which follows it. And from that time, we tend to, tend to prefer the conceptual and try and make our real world fit in with the conceptual. And that's created the whole of our civilization. Somebody thought, That's a nice barn. We put stuff at the top and a dragon, and made those rough walls to get people to pay to come in. And then they did it, and we come in and we say, Oh, that's a nice place for the dragon. We can sit in here and have talks.

So that's based on the conceptual. We've constructed something from our minds and all gone along with it. But, yes, go on. Morality, yes. it Yes. It can do. We can do, but very often our abstract morality doesn't follow through into our actions, and we can see that so many examples of that, it's unbelievable. In fact, the people who are most abstractly moral often have dark secrets. The American preacher who's shouting about the sinfulness of sex was nipping round the back to the motel where he had a little lady.

So abstract morality is important. Abstract, everything abstract is important in a society which is based on constructions that we share. But we can't make the world fit in exactly with our concepts. This is the problem. So if we believe our concepts are of paramount importance and try and make the world fit in, we usually have big problems. But the difficulty is for human beings is we don't know whether our ideas are realistic or not until we try them out. And then when we try them out, we don't know whether to go with our idea or to give up our idea and follow reality.

Stubborn people hold on to their ideas sometimes and have good results sometimes. Sometimes they have disastrous results because their ideas are unrealistic. So how do we find our way through that maze? Well, what we try and do, at least, is to understand the nature of what we do when we conceptualize, and what it is that we construct and share, and what is basic, unconstructed and shared, and go backwards and forwards between them, and we get some feeling for who we are and what we're doing. And this is what we do in zazen in a very simple way.

We lose ourselves in our thoughts, and then we come back to what we're actually doing, which is something very, very simple. Then we lose ourselves in our thoughts, and we come back to what we're doing again. And slowly, slowly, we get some feeling for what we're doing. Oh, I'm losing myself in my thoughts. Oh, I'm coming back to reality. Oh, I'm off in my thoughts again. Oh, now I'm back in reality. Very good exercise. Kind of mental aerobics. Master Dogen goes on.

Now he's onto a slightly different subject, still about the now or time present, but from a slightly different tack.

Until we study the Buddhist view, it is normal to think that time present means that one particular time we become angry, another particular time we become a Buddha, and we imagine events as part of a journey, as though we were crossing a river or walking over a mountain pass. And although we feel fairly sure that the mountain pass or the river are still present back there when we cross them, we have already passed them and moved on to be illuminated by the present, leaving them behind in the far distance.

So here, in 13th century medieval Japanese, Master Dogen's creating a picture of linear time, linear progression of time. So he's saying, normally we think, okay, there's now, and there's the now that's just gone, and there's the future now, and they're all like on a journey.

So what we did this morning is somehow back there over the hill where we just came from, and then we're going over this hill up to the top of there, and then down again. So we imagine this journey, and we call that journey life. And we all do it. We construct our journey and call it our life. And we somehow think that the past is back there, back there somewhere. We went on holiday to south of France, Yoko and I, in July, and if I start talking about it, tell you where we stayed and everything, it's as if it's back, back there somewhere. I don't know quite where, but it's back there. The holiday's back there, and we've moved on.

Participant: Some suppositions have the idea of the past as being in front. You can see it, whereas the future is behind you in the distance.

Mike: That's a good one.

Participant: Put those people up if you incline if you look along the timeline because they can see where this game is pointing.

Mike: Oh yes, that's nice. Spike Milligan. I'm walking backwards for Christmas across the Irish Sea. Oh. Yes, that's good. Simile. And all these kind of similes, metaphors, as the one he's creating in this paragraph, give us different views on what our experience is. It seems to be very about ideas of time breakdown, because it's hugely possible to conceive, say, other than through the metaphor of a landscape or event. Does seem, yes.

Yes. But to solve the problem of that impossible situation, the practice does it. Because zazen is a repeated experience of the now. And human beings are so intellectual, our ability to conceptualize is so powerful that we can't escape from our conceptualization. So some people like to talk about what happened to them in the past a lot, especially people talk about their holidays. Oh, and then we went here, and then we went there, and then they get the photographs out, and it's real, you know. They're describing their journey that they've been on. And sometimes that's quite boring to listen to.

Other people let go of the past, and once something's happened, they're not interested in it anymore. And sometimes they can be quite boring too. But the thing is, to be trapped in one view makes it difficult for us to see reality. So if we're only trapped in the view of, you know, then we can't see that really the past has gone forever. So whatever happened in the past, we can't put it right now. We can do something now, and we can call it putting the past right, but it's not putting the past right; it's putting the present right.

So to find a crack in our linear view of time is a kind of liberation. It doesn't mean we have to say there's no such thing as time.

Participant: I'm not late because there's no time. Walk into work at half past five in the evening.

Participant: [unclear, 00:39:04–00:39:12: “You can compare the situation of time in a way. At some point, you sort of there because we agree.” / “You get a bit of comparison with the idea of a time with a blank sample of it, you assume it's there because we agree it's there.”]

Question: Yes. You mean that we shouldn't do that?

Mike: It seems inevitable that we have to do that.

Participant: Yeah,

Mike: It

Participant: sure.

Mike: seems inevitable. We have to, inevitably, we have to agree and accept and believe in a shared flow of process, because that's what keeps us as a civilization going. But to be trapped in it means that we're forever trapped in past, present, future, and that can sometimes create suffering for us. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, I don't know either.

We could say, in a way, if we said instead of time being spread out like a journey, has a depth in something, we're grasping for images to satisfy our experience. Master Dogen gives an example in the next paragraph. So he said in that paragraph we just read that we normally think that things happen at different nows, and those nows are kind of journey, and we're on that journey, so the past is back there and we're heading over to the future. Then he changes to the opposite and different point of view.

But this is not the only way to think about it. At the time when we are crossing the mountain pass or crossing the river, we are present there, and so time is present there. Time cannot elude the present. Accepting that time does not appear and disappear. The time when we are crossing the mountain pass is also a real time present. And even if time were to appear and disappear, the time when time is actually present is also a time present. Then how can the time when we are crossing the mountain pass, or crossing the river, not be swallowed up in the time when we are illuminated by the light of the present? How can we say that the time when we are crossing the mountain pass, or crossing the river, does not spew out this present brightness?

The bigger one. But what he's saying in that paragraph is similar to what Stuart is trying to express, and that is we sense some kind of depth or spread of time even in the present moment. How should we describe it?

So he says instead of thinking of time and being a journey going that way, we can think of time spread out that way, or spread in that way. But actually astronomers do this, because when they look out into the universe at stars, they know that the light from the stars took so many years to get back, get to Earth. So when they're looking out at the star... A hundred million light years away, another one two hundred million light years away, they're looking over a... they're looking over a panorama of time. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's right.

So our ability to hold something in our memory, a trace in our memory, allows us to make these constructions. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Participant: Actually, half of the community are in it.

Mike: Yes.

Participant: Nothing about faith. But if you do it, I don't know. If you don't have faith, you might forget it, isn't it? It might be the only way forward, but if you just go down, have faith in the creator of all man.

Mike: Yes. Yes. But when the astronomer stands looking through his telescope and he sees stars over there and over there, he knows that those are in the past. So he's seeing in the past. And this is the image that Dogen is, similar kind of image, trying to create. Only an image.

It's only creating ways to look at our experience, because our actual experience is rather more unusual than we normally notice. Because we're always here. We never see the moment changing to the next moment, yet it's always changing. Yes, it would be fantastic. Yes. Certainly, if we think about how our experience works, touch, sight, we can't explain it in terms of an instant. It needs a process for us to understand it.

So in order to understand how I can see you, I have to talk about light coming from you into my eye, and then signals coming from my eye to my brain, and then so on. And that all only makes sense in time, and scientists measure how many milliseconds it takes and so on. So we can't make any sense of it without linear concepts of time. But the fact we can't make sense of it doesn't mean it fits exactly the model that we make sense of. Does that make sense? Yes.

Participant: The kind of structure. The difference between sort of swallowing, swallowing and vomiting off.

Mike: Yes.

Participant: And that's, swallowing is like an inclusive thing.

Mike: Yes.

Participant: And vomiting off is kind of differentiation from a human.

Mike: Yes, that's right. It is a difficult thing he's talking about, but the difficulty is something we don't notice, the unusual situation that we live in. We've constructed our ship called civilisation. We are floating along in it and we haven't we haven't realised that there's water out there. It doesn't mean that when we notice we're in a boat going along in the water, we should jump out of the boat.

Just we can notice where we are. We can notice that we're here, that we're always here, that everything is always here, that everything is always changing, and that there are contradictions. I'll just go on to the next paragraph.

Although the angry person is an event in the past and the Buddha is here today, we can also think of time as if going up into the mountains and looking out over thousands of peaks, rather than seeing time as passing us by. The time peak when we become angry is then a time present, even though it seems to have receded into the past. And the time peak when we become Buddha is also a time present, even though it seems to be back there.

So another, the image we were talking about just now of looking out over the past and future, rather than the linear view. ‘Then a pine tree is a time present, and a bamboo thicket is a time present.’ So the pine tree and the bamboo thicket are concrete objects existing at the present moment. So just briefly to recap, the chapter started off with a poem which said, Reality is now, reality is now, reality is now.

Now I'm angry, now I'm happy, now I'm outside, now I'm inside. So breaking up our idea of time being a flow. Then Master Dogen went on to say, But although reality is now, now, now, we can't help see time as a process through the day. Then he went on to say, But when we think of time as a process through the day, we think of it as a time and a journey, linear journey, right? Past, present, future. But we can also think of it another way.

Instead of going past, present, future, we can think of present. And the past and future being out there, like a big range of mountains. He was writing in the 13th century. He didn't have the vocabulary of psychology, astronomy, you know. He didn't have the benefit of Einstein's theory of relativity, curved space, time differentials, digital clocks. So he created poetic images to try and say similar things. So he's exploring the way we look at time and giving us different ways to look at it. Yes.

Participant: I think you could say that the actual thing is there will come to you working with loads of people requesting loads of directions for the trip.

Mike: Yes, absolutely. It's good news, yeah. Because we're searching for the truth, if we carry on searching, we'll find it. Of course, if we search for the truth in the wrong direction, we may never find it. So, for instance, if we decide that everything can be solved by crystal gazing, we can crystal gaze from now until we die, but we won't get any nearer the truth. But we have something more excellent than crystal gazing called science. And science says, look at what's outside, and then say, Huh, that's probably not true.

Let me find out if it is or not, and then thoroughly pull the thing apart to see whether it's true or not. And if you can't prove that it's false, then you say, Okay, for the time being, that's true, and then you move on. So that's a very powerful exploration of truth. So if science continues in that way, it must find, must move closer to the truth.

Question: that is a non-conceptual experience

Mike: Yes.

Question: rather than a conceptual?

Mike: Yes.

Participant: So it matters how long you conceptualize about it. You might get closer to it, but you're always going to miss it until you drop that concept.

Mike: Yes. So it's quite interesting that more and more people involved in scientific exploration are interested in practicing zazen. Because, for instance, I went to this consciousness conference, and on the Saturday morning I gave a zazen sitting in the morning, and on the Sunday morning somebody else did mindfulness sitting. Now, I might not think mindfulness sitting is as good as zazen. But at least these scientists exploring all these conceptual ideas are sitting like this. It's amazing, really, isn't it? They must be doing that for some valid reason. What is it?

They may not know. So maybe intuitively, people who are exploring this what is true from the scientific perspective, maybe intuitively they realise sometime in the distant future I'm going to have to jump out of all this. Or maybe they're trying, maybe they already know that they're going to have to jump out of it, and they're trying to find the link between outside and inside. I don't know. But I'm sure that if people pursue the truth with the most powerful tools that we have, they'll get closer to it. Shall we stop?

Well, at the end of the talk, let us recite Fueko. The first three lines of Fueko, we chant at normal speed. Sorry, four, four lines, and the last three lines we chant slower. But just follow everyone else.

[recitation, 00:56:49–00:57:41]

Thank you very much.